Night Owl Cards

  OK, back by popular demand, here is a look at my collection based on who is in the Division Series (what used to be the lowliest of the playoff series, but now we have a bunch of wild-card hoo hah and fandoodle).   There are four new teams to consider. Of course, there are four holdover teams that I've already considered, so for those four repeats, I'm going to select my second "oldest" and "newest" card for that team. The random is still random.   All right, I have the Dusty Baker card above that represents three teams in this postseason. Let's do this:   ORIOLES VS. RANGERS   Baltimore Orioles (cards in my collection: 2,574. Overall rank: 14th)   Oldest card in my collection: 1956 Topps Chuck Diering (I decided to leave a lot of these uncropped, because I like the effect ... or did at the time).     Newest card in collection: 2023 Topps Heritage New Age Performers Gunnar Henderson.  Random card in my collection: 1988 Topps Jim Dwyer Thoughts? : The

  For several years on this blog, I wrote an annual "if I was king of the postseason" post to kick off the baseball playoffs. It was fun -- just me riffing on who my favorites and least favorites were for that particular year -- but it was a lot of work. Then it started getting repetitive/monotonous and also a couple people got their undies in a bunch about what I wrote. I don't need to be dedicating a lot of time to something just to get a bunch of grief out of it, so I stopped. I don't miss it. But I do miss writing about the postseason a little. I thought it'd be fun to take a look at each of the wild card matchups in a lighthearted fashion -- no overt rooting here -- with the help of TCDB and my collection. I'm going to take a look at the oldest and newest cards in my collection for each team, plus a random card selected by the TCDB randomizer. There are some interesting connections between these teams. Here we go: RANGERS VS. RAYS Texas Rangers (cards in